The line drawing characters were serious business. Because I love mazes. Though they were most often mis-used as menu borders. Novell achieved world domination with line drawing characters.
Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#12My first association for this symbol isn’t a house, but an indent marker, like here (“Right Indent Box” in particular): https://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/help/images/ruler.p...
Or here as a tab stop in GeoWrite (in the top left, below the “file” menu): https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/commodore64/images/6/68/Ge...
Some mechanical typewriters had physical markers/stops that looked similar. The best I could find in a hurry: https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/files/DSC_7...
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#13My guess: it's the "mode change" code found in various IBM punchcard encodings, punch 11-8-7, canonically represented by an upper-case delta.
It would make sense to render this somewhat differently from the regular Greek character. This may also explain why it's rendered differently in various manuals: once, as commonly represented in EBCDIC charts, as a delta, once, as it's actually represented in the on-screen character set.
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#14It's a reference to Murnau's "Nosferatu" where a letter from Orlok is written in a strange ideographic language that includes a picture of a house, evidently relating Orlok's request to buy a house.
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#15Does anyone know why it’s “code page 437”? Like why 437? Was there 437 code pages before it? Does the 437 bit pattern map to something in the hardware? Was it a character rom part number?
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#16Does anyone know why it’s “code page 437”? Like why 437? Was there 437 code pages before it? Does the 437 bit pattern map to something in the hardware? Was it a character rom part number?
It originates from the code page 37, which is the EBCDIC-based character set for US and Canada. At least initially EBCDIC code pages are numbered sequentially while PC DOS code pages were numbered more or less randomly; I have no clue why it is the code page 437 and not 337. (I can see why it is not 137 nor 237, as later code pages were numbered from 251.)
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#17I seem to recall whether 0xE1 in codepage 437 is supposed to be a Greek lowercase beta (β) or a German sharp s (ẞ) is intentionally a bit fuzzy, so its perhaps they intended it to be both a delta and a dingbat. I'm not really sure if a house fits it that much, wouldn't a generic "house" symbol have a chimney (although obviously, it's hard to fit one in with such a low resolution).
It's most likely meant to be Delta, as used in mathematics and science (which is typically smaller than the Greek letter). Not only is the Delta in the Greek character similarly shaped, but Lambda is similarly distorted in the greek character set. Likewise, A, N, V, Y, K (arguably), and W (arguably) are distorted.
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#18What about that it's 0x0111 1111? Could be a reference to hole punching
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#19I think you’d want to compare the “other deltas” when rendered on a crappy CGA monitor. I’m not sure they’d be much better than the house.
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#20I seem to recall whether 0xE1 in codepage 437 is supposed to be a Greek lowercase beta (β) or a German sharp s (ẞ) is intentionally a bit fuzzy, so its perhaps they intended it to be both a delta and a dingbat. I'm not really sure if a house fits it that much, wouldn't a generic "house" symbol have a chimney (although obviously, it's hard to fit one in with such a low resolution).
It's most likely meant to be Delta, as used in mathematics and science (which is typically smaller than the Greek letter). Not only is the Delta in the Greek character similarly shaped, but Lambda is similarly distorted in the greek character set. Likewise, A, N, V, Y, K (arguably), and W (arguably) are distorted.
Although originally the character Δ began life as 𐤃 (named dalet, meaning door) so it should be a door, not a house (he says with a wink) and that β should be the house (from 𐤁, bet, meaning house).